Keyblade Chronicle OneOffs
by HVK
Summary: A storehouse of short stories, ficlets and one-shots set in my Kingdom Crossovers continuity, some canon in-story. Latest post is 'Scars and Hunger', wherein Sierra and Zim have a romantic moment in spite of Sierra's issues over being a Gargantuan Ogre changeling.
1. Furnace

Written up on Tumblr as a ficlet; the interesting possibilities of Zuko and Marceline's friendship give me a lot of ideas, particuarily them comparing notes on their childhoods.

...Ozai is FAR more evil than Hunson Abadeer, I will remark.

* * *

"So," Marceline asked Zuko one lazy day as the crew's ship flew aimlessly through the Astral Plane, periodically taking potshots at space pirates. "I hear your mom left when you were a kid?"

"…Yeah," Zuko said guardedly, turning so that she faced the side of his face that wasn't a mutilated horror. "There were complications. I…" He hesitated. No point in having friends if you couldn't be honest. But honesty was _dangerous_. Tip around the words, nudge at the truth, it would be close enough. "My family's not exactly normal."

"I know the feels," Marceline said airily. Her posture matched her tone, her body drifted off the floor and floating into midair until she was hovering right over Zuko's head. "So. I was on the phone with your buds and I heard you were raised by your dad."

"Technically I was raised by my uncle," Zuko said. "Dad-" He stopped. "I mean, Father…Father never really paid attention to me unless I upset him or he decided to instruct me directly."

Marceline frowned, perhaps at Zuko's odd phrasing, more likely at the way he winced when he corrected himself. A clump of her hair tweaked at the air for a moment. "…My mom was gone when I was a little kid too," She admitted, suddenly forthright.

Six months was a long time to spend in a ship together, them and Zim and Calvin and Hobbes and Sierra and Kamina and Scyala; a degree of fraternity was expected.

"It was just me and my dad for a while." Marceline looked evenly at Zuko, her teal-blue eyes meeting his eyes, yellow and sun-bright and scarred for life. "I was just thinking, what if we have more in common than just that? What was your dad like?"

Zuko thought for a moment.

(_"Get up," Father says in the distant past, as cold as the heat of the furnaces blazing all around them. "You are _shaming _yourself."_

_Zuko, barely nine years old and such an embarassment to his Firebending instructors that Father is sickened enough to take a hand to the matter himself, sits on the floor and his knees are aching where they've been struck and his hand hurts nearly as bad as all of him did when Mother vanished and no one would tell him why-_

"_Get _up_," Father demands again, voice low and silky and patience rapidly turning to dust._

'_Don't make your father angry', Zuko has heard from the handmaidens that like him and the servants who are always so happy to tend to him and not Azula; they _like_ him, favor the polite and happy prince over the bratty and horridly cold princess and rumors are spreading about the screams people hear from her quarters and the skinless animals found in the trashheaps and Zuko can't bear to lose any more pets now. The people who work under Zuko can't bear to see him hurt anymore._

"_Father," Zuko whimpers, and the open furnace in front of them is a demon with it's jaws open, and the heat of the fire is maddening; it's evil and welcoming at the same time, and his heart breaks at the thought that something so good as fire could be so hateful to human flesh. "Father, I can't-!"_

_Father's face twists into something like digust and hate mixed, even worse when Zuko bat-squirrels back just a bit. "You will," He says gravely and grabs Zuko's burned hand by the wrist, and Zuko is too small and too weak to resist, or do anything more than a brief squalling whimper at the heat of Father's grip. "Pain is weakness leaving the body, Prince Zuko, suffering is enlightenment, and hear me now, you _will_ learn."_

_Ignoring the cries of his child, Father thrusts Zuko's hand into the furnace as he has done six times this hour, hissing the lessons on absorbing the heat, and it's a long time before the scars heal or Uncle comes home and never finds out._

_But Zuko _does_ learn to dissipate fire. It's the only way he manages to keep his hand, and when Uncle does return, Zuko throws himself into his hug and cries and cries for hours, and Uncle holds him even through this shameful weakness, and Zuko begins to understand what it means to be loved-)_

Zuko flexed his hand, thinking of long-gone burns that had healed a long time ago. He weighed his thoughts, thinking of what was appropiate and was not, and eventually said, "My dad wasn't very good at being a parent," he said lamely. He thought for a moment. "Come to think of it, he was kind of a jerk."

* * *

Zuko. He's a master of understatement.


	2. Scars and Hunger

Sierra is big for a changeling of the Ogre kith, big even for a Gargantuan made in the model of giants (and she's met a few, fought some, and she knows how odd it is that they often have to look up to meet her eyes), and Zim is small even for his kind, barely taller than a small child (but proportionately stronger than a athletic man, she thinks to herself, and these are pink fluffy thoughts that haven't been her's for a very long time), so to meet his eyes properly she has to hunker on the ground on her leans and lean over and she _still_ has to tilt her head down just to peer down at him, her face still half a head higher than him.

To part of her, the part that's still human (ragged and wounded and changed beyond recognition though it is) the whole idea makes no sense, this hope of a...relationship with him. It goes against so many things, not the least the disparity in their size (it could be dangerous for him, she frets), the difference in their temperments, even that they're different species. Could it even work, that part of her wonders, is he even capable of reciprocating love physically? Another part of her, increasingly dominant and well-aware of all the things in the worlds that make absolutely no sense and yet happen anyway, declares that the experiment is worth pursuing.

And then, that he is so much smaller than her is no longer a problem or a complication but an aesthetic twist, and the synchronity of it pleases her; the feminity of her immensity, the masculinity of his smallness, it flows together and ebbs into a sweetness that feels _right_, strange and unexpected and against so many of the idea she was raised as a child that women were normally smaller than men. This is definitely not the case with them (and it's more obvious than ever as he slowly walks over to her, and she is aware that she is so big that the whole of his body isn't even as wide as her broad thighs, but perhaps that's just because she's so big)-

Hunger. A phantom feeling of emptiness begging to be filled, a hollow that feels like it's in the pit of her stomach but going through the space of years when the humanity had been ripped from her and this alien fae-ness put into it's place, and Sierra winced at how powerful it felt this time, a yawning abyss shouting and screaming and crying to be sated, worn ragged by loneliness and humiliation and abuse. She had known hunger when she had still been human but it had just been a word then, and now there did not seem to be words for this impossible ravaging emptiness that went beyond the need for food, that grinding horror ripping her guts apart until she consumed _something_, anything, and no matter what she ripped or tore or just swallowed in a single gulp it never got better, just sated this Dark Appetite of her's and quieted it enough that she could actually think for a second, dimmed down from that low and miserable grinding in her guts and her head-

(In Arcadia, other changelings had told her, metaphor built the stuff of reality. The need to eat, the constant insane monstrous hunger that was so awful she could eat _anything_ no matter if it was meat or brick or wood or concrete or raw plutonium or trashy romance novels just as long as it quited the hollow pain inside, was a reflection of deeper appetites, more ephemeral hungers. She kept to herself the stories of the boyfriend she'd had once, a great love now long-dead, torn down where he stood by Wrath incarnate and the loss of him and everything he had stood for and his place in his life just ripped open and it had ripped herself open. She had been lonely before, and the need for affection, for companionship, for love, had mutated and now there was just the hunger, sharpening her teeth and twisting her insides and it only felt better when she was near Zim, talking to him and him listening to her and them just being _together_ and being friends and maybe even something better than that.)

The Ogrish appetite that was part of being the new Sierra (as she thought of herself sometimes, though she'd been like this for years and years and years) rose as he approached, shifted about like a barely changed beast, and finally settled down as he stopped right in front of her, that nearly detached look of curiosity on his face, and the hunger went to sleep just as her heart speeded up a few beats, pumping more than was physically possible.

She was already having some trouble propping herself up with her hands, steady and powerful though her arms were (stippled with small spikes here and there), and a lovely thrill flushed down her neck when he raised an arm up and laid the palm of his hand right over a hornlet extruding from her jaw, his skin so smooth and warm and soft that she thought she might be dizzy from it, slowly tracing a pattern, experimental in it's hesitance and fascination, softly examining the texture of her dark skin and not shying away from the scars or the burns or the places where her leathery skin was turning into the beginings of dragonish scales, and it was getting truly hard to resist the impulse to lick her lips, espicially when he actually _did_ put his fingers on her lips, his inhuman red eyes suddenly bright with emotion and his knees shifting back awkwardly, and not for the first time it strikes Sierra that she is vastly more experienced in romance than he is.

His hand starts to pull away, a hint of a blush (purplish, from the color of his blood) on his cheeks. Her hand moves quick, grabbing his wrist neatly between her thumb and forefinger. He blinked, startled and unable to resist her overwhelming strength (not for nothing is she the most physically powerful of the crew) and went utterly quiet and wondering as she placed his hand right on the edge of her lip, at the corner of her mouth-

Right on the scar there, one of a pair.

The scars on her face are as plain as day, as obvious as the burn on half of Zuko's face, and like his scars, no one talks about it. They don't stare at the scars running from the scorners of her mouth to her ears, ragged and looping-dividing her face neatly, badly sewn up with marks to show where the inept stitches had been ripped loose. A perpetual and constantly mirthless smile, carved into her face either by her own hand in a moment of lapsed sanity or some indifferently malicious True Fae.

Zim has enough of a loose grasp on politeness not to ask her out of hand how she had been so terribly hurt. He simply asks, "Does that hurt?"

"Nuh-uh," Sierra tells him, and it is truth enough. The scars are not so deep as to restrict her facial muscles or jaw. They are simply disfigurement, a surface reflection of the deeper mutilation of simply being a changeling (abomination, fae-touched horror, an Ogre, shaped by abuse and remade into an oversized monster; she'd thought all this rhetoric and worse).

"…What did this to you?" Zim's touch hardens for a moment, as though cherishing thoughts of strangling whoever scarred her so.

"I don't remember," Sierra replied softly. It was gone, past, left to rot. Best to leave it be. "…I don't _want _to remember."

Zim is silent. His hand stays where it is. His other hand moves onto the knuckle of the hand that is still holding him in place, slides around and finds it's way to her index finger. His hand is just barely big enough to squeeze her finger.

It's just like being hugged, warm and good, and she has to blink back tears. She smiles, and in a moment of impulse, ducks her head forward to kiss him right on the forehead.

She expects him to back away or get scared or simply panic. He does not, and she feels a sudden warmth coming from him, all of him, the inner fire instilled in him warming to a cheery blaze-

It is, she finds shortly thereafter, extremely nice to hug someone a good deal smaller than her.


End file.
